Please Punch Me

By
Daryl Khan

A fear-ridden father corners his midlife crisis by enticing an ex-con boxing champ into the ring for the bout of a lifetime.

33 minutesNew York

Photos by Robert Stolarik

On a bitterly cold January morning in 2008, Adam Friedman and Alvin Valentine, friends and co-workers, climbed into a Brooklyn boxing ring and proceeded to go at each other for three hard-hitting rounds. There was nothing particularly artistic about what transpired in those grunting six minutes. Some solid blows were landed; there were no knockouts, and thankfully no blood. It was one fight of probably dozens that transpired in that ring that day.

But for both men, the boxing match represented something very different. For Valentine, a former Blood gang leader and longtime inmate, it was a chance to fight for something other than his life; to fight for fun instead of respect, or to instill discipline in the yard or send a message to a fellow inmate. For Friedman, it was a chance to face down a monster that had tormented him since childhood—fear.

That both men would ever cross paths, let alone face each other down in the squared circle, was unlikely. They both worked at Exodus Transitional Community, a grassroots organization with the goal of helping recently released inmates make their way back into mainstream society. But they came from as different backgrounds as New York City can offer, a distance much farther than the trip between the Upper West Side and Brownsville.

* * *

“Do you ever think about going back to your old life?” Friedman asked Valentine at work one day.

“Every day, every day,” Valentine responded.

“Why?”

“Because,” Valentine answered, humorlessly, “when you’re a drug dealer you never get an email saying you forgot to put something in the database.”

Alvin Valentine’s sweeping and audacious criminal career—a career that spanned a third of his life; a career rife with stick-ups, guns, knives, shivs, blood and Bloods, gang orders, and an encounter with a fresh one-legged corpse—all started with a child’s bicycle.

When he was twelve or thirteen, Valentine committed his first crime. He was hanging out with some friends in East Harlem, where he grew up, when he saw another group of kids. He liked one of their bicycles. They had it; he wanted it. He convinced his friends to rob them. He approached the biggest of the rival kids, beat him up and took the bike. It felt good. Beating the toughest kid filled him with pride.

When he turned forty years old, Adam Friedman, a father of two and deputy director of Exodus, made an odd request of his co-worker and friend. Friedman asked Valentine to beat him up.

Friedman, as best as he could describe it, was in the throes of a soul-gnawing mid-life crisis. A recent father, Friedman said he did not want his children to grow up a coward the way he felt he had. He thought he would find a cure for his tortured inner life in a boxing ring, facing down a former gang leader who was a decorated Golden Gloves fighter and boxing champion at Sing Sing prison.

Ever since he was a boy, Friedman ran from fights. Alvin Valentine would start and often finish them. Now Friedman and Valentine, thirty at the time of this bizarre request, were about to fight each other. The two men come from two different worlds. One lives in Trump Tower; the other in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Brownsville, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city. But on a frigid Saturday morning those two worlds intersected in the boxing ring of a sweat-soaked Brooklyn gym.

* * *

It’s Not a Good Feeling

Friedman has always been averse to physical conflict. One spineless retreat from his teen years sticks out. He was walking to his New Rochelle high school cafeteria to meet a girl he had a crush on. He was carrying a copy of a Shakespeare play when three classmates intercepted him. They snatched the book and began tossing it around in a bully’s game of keep-away. Finally one of the students took the book and walked away. He brazenly stuck it in his back pocket, daring the young Friedman to come and take it. He never did.

Adam Friedman at Exodus Transitional Community in Harlem.

“He was asking me to walk over there and punch him,” he says. “And I should have. But I didn’t. I was too scared.”

That moment of cowardice has shaped the man Friedman has become, and on a chilly Saturday morning nearly six years ago, he visited Gleason’s Gym in Dumbo, a waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn, to exorcise this demon. Impending middle age has made Friedman obsessed with confronting fears that have dogged him his entire life. Months before, he finally confronted his fear of blood by donating for the first time. But a fear of fighting topped the list.

As Friedman approached his fortieth birthday, he became obsessed. And as a former boxer and hardened former gang leader, Valentine became the target of his desire to get this fear of fighting out of his system. He incessantly nagged Valentine about setting about up. Valentine finally relented to Friedman’s requests.

In the days leading up to the showdown, Friedman could already feel the fear that had dogged him his whole life reasserting itself. As part of his training he sparred with opponents much bigger and more skilled than himself. He left one of those sessions with a bloody nose and shaken confidence. He worried that the “humongous” guy he fought only went at him at half-speed. What would happen, he thought with a shudder, when Valentine came at him unrestrained?

“When I get in the ring, I want to get hit—I want to see what I’m made of,” he said. “I’m not confident I’m made of much.”

Valentine, for his part, said he thought Friedman would leave the fight a “humbler and wiser” man.

“He will learn a lot about himself,” he said. “He will learn how he reacts under pressure and crisis. He will also learn how he reacts under pain.”

When the day for the fight arrived, the cold, implacable reality started to settle in.

“I feel weak at my core,” Friedman said as he loosened up on the mats outside the ring. “It’s a shaky, weak, unsteady feeling inside. I feel un-solid, like my muscles don’t feel firm. The more I can really picture, not just picture getting hit but feeling the hit, I picture him coming in more, hitting me and clocking me. The feeling of not just getting hit but having to go for two more rounds…”

He added, with a Woody Allen-like instinct for understatement: “It’s not a good feeling.”

* * *

Moments before stepping into the ring on the day of the bout, that fear is obvious on Friedman’s face and in his lanky, lean body, which swims in a torn t-shirt. His gaunt, pale legs stick out of a pair of old, ragged Jams shorts. He sits by himself, a stricken look on his face. His complexion is ashen. His breathing is shallow. His eyes dart nervously around the gym, staring at demons no one else can see. The gym is alive with activity—boxers sparring, wrestlers crunching their bodies on the mat with a thunderous boom, the unmistakable sound of a fist slammed into a face—but Friedman doesn’t register them.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the gym, his opponent is smiling. Valentine’s toned muscles pop beneath his shirt. He shadowboxes skillfully. His long dreadlocks are bound tightly in a bunch. He is loose and confident. When asked if he has any concerns about the fight with Friedman, his boss, he shakes his head with a devilish smile.

Adam Friedman celebrates his 40th birthday by going in the ring with his colleague, Alvin Valentine, a former Golden Gloves boxer, at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn.

“No,” he says. “I’m good.”

“When this fight is over me and Adam are returning to two different worlds,” he says. “We’re going to speak different languages, live by different rules. He’s going to his apartment in the Trump Towers, I’m going to my one-bedroom apartment in Brownsville.”

As Friedman readies himself for the fight, someone points to a sign taped to a column. It reads “In Case of Boxer Emergency.” He does not find it funny. The amateur contestants climb into the ring. Friedman’s demeanor changes. He is no longer in a ring. He is muttering to himself, working himself into a vengeful reverie. At that moment he is envisioning his young son on a playground at P.S. 199 on the West Side of Manhattan. He is playing out a scenario where Valentine is picking on his son and he is going over to stop it.

Friedman and Valentine glare at one another as the referee reads the rules. Valentine’s fist crashes into Friedman’s face before the bell rings.

It’s early on the Monday morning after the fight, and Valentine is at the Exodus Transitional Community, housed in the Church of the Living Hope, a white, crumbling four story building on East 104th Street. In a dark second-floor room with low ceilings, three dozen recently released prisoners sit in institutional folding chairs. A few perch on a windowsill. All of the faces are black or Latino. They are rapt as Valentine speaks.

Exodus Transitional Community in East Harlem.

He is part preacher, part self-help guru, part hard-nosed CEO delivering a no-nonsense business presentation. He is a different man than the sculpted fighter itching to get in the ring. He wears a pair of dress pants that hang fashionably loose around brown dress shoes, and a matching tie against a collared shirt.

After a pause, a member in the audience mutters a response, something about someone who can’t keep it together on the outside.

“If you don’t do anything to achieve that goal you become one of those people,” Valentine smiles knowingly. “You know the type.”

The crowd, loosening up a bit, chuckles in recognition.

“They talk about doing this and doing that,” he continues. “People filled with broken promises and dreams that never materialize."

“The road to hell is paved with what?”

“Good intentions,” a young man barks.

“That’s right,” Valentine sniffs. “And good intentions don’t feed babies. We’re dead serious about what we do here at Exodus.”

Valentine never had the luxury to fear fights because there was a scuffle every day when he was growing up in the city. He turned to a life of crime at an early age. At about the same age that Friedman was when enduring the taunts of bullies, Valentine saw his first dead bodies. The corpses were new, scattered around a counting house for a drug dealer in Harlem.

Valentine received a tip from a girlfriend whose mother counted cash for the dealer, and he set out to rob the place. He snuck up on the apartment and realized right away something was wrong.

He crept into the house, his gun drawn, and saw a pair of mannequin-like legs poking from the doorway of the kitchen. As he made his way to the room he was startled by a dead woman shot to death on the kitchen floor, her prosthetic leg leaning against a blood-spattered wall.

“It was so quiet I could hear the hum of the refrigerator,” he remembers. He slipped out of the bloodbath, careful to wipe his prints off the door and anything else he touched.

After arrests on drug and armed robbery charges for sticking up a McDonald's, Valentine spent time in various prisons upstate. In prison, as he describes it, he did what he had to do. That included stabbing people who stepped out of line.

At Exodus he started a new life, but one that is challenged every day. His old life constantly threatens to undo his new one.

“Every single day,” he says. “Every day. The temptation is huge.”

Shortly before his fight with Friedman, Valentine was offered several thousand dollars a week to become an enforcer for a New Jersey drug dealer. He turned down the offer. But his small salary and the demands of impending fatherhood—his girlfriend was pregnant with their first child—are always on his mind.

Alvin Valentine looks out from his favorite perch in Brooklyn.

He says he is riveted by a vision, a metaphor that reminds him of his desire to never return to prison: It is of a burned ship that he has set on fire after sailing it away from prison. In his mind, Valentine thinks that if you destroy the ship, it is impossible to take it back to prison. In this thought exercise, he has stranded himself in a mainstream world of jobs and schedules and responsibility, and he has no choice but to make it work. It has to work. He can’t go back.

After the workshop, he ascends the steps to the roof of the church and recounts how he had to take an intern up there after a disturbing incident a while back. A client who recently enrolled in the program had become hostile toward the intern and started intimidating him. The intern came from a wealthy household. The client had just been released from prison. Valentine explained to the intern how hard it is to grow up knowing you are never going to have that life, the psychological toll it can take.

“This is my favorite place on earth,” he says as reaches the roof, pointing with a sweep of his arm toward the panoramic view of the city’s rich and poor. “It keeps me grounded. Why do I dedicate my life to this work? There are hundreds of young men down there who are going through what I went through. I can use what I know and get them on a different path.”

There was a period when, if Valentine saw a police officer, he worried about getting locked up. After he started working at Exodus, he says he began to look at police with a sense of relief.

“I know they’re there to protect me,” he says. “I’m the perfect example of what a prisoner to professional looks like.”

* * *

Who is This White Dude?

Julio Medina, forty-six, started Exodus in the early 1990s from his mother’s kitchen table after serving years for being a self-described drug kingpin.

“I was this major drug dealer,” he said from his office. “I realized I could use the smarts that I used for a negative and channel that into doing something I wanted to do.”

He performs the unglamorous work of keeping prisoners from the revolving door of incarceration. Without assistance readjusting to regular life, Medina says, many ex-convicts end up back in prison.

Sharon White, who served eleven years for manslaughter and then worked as a program manager at Exodus, says the work Exodus and similar organizations do is instrumental in preventing that from happening.

“The bottom line is that there are people coming home,” she says. “They’re coming home every day, whether you like it or not. The question is, what are you going to do with them?”

At Exodus, Friedman and Valentine are essential parts of answering that question. But Medina came close to not hiring either of them. Friedman came in for his interview with a suit and tie, a sophisticated resumé and a folder containing his work from a high-powered advertising firm.

“I didn’t care about any of that,” Medina says. “I couldn’t imagine this lanky white guy being able to deal with hard-bitten criminals every day.”

Medina indulged Friedman, reassuring him that he’d consider his application, with no intention of calling him back—until he saw the “lanky white guy” interacting with a room full of ex-cons, slapping them five and engaging them in easy, friendly conversation.

“Adam really connected with them,” he says. “It was amazing. I made up my mind to hire him right then.”

Valentine, conversely, started his career as a client. But even that almost didn’t happen. Valentine’s attitude was so disruptive his first day at Exodus that he was thrown out.

“He was like, ‘You all don’t know who I am,’” Medina remembers, doing his best tough guy impression. “‘I’m Alvin Valentine. I don’t need you all.’”

Julio Medina outside the headquarters of Exodus Transitional Community in Harlem.

If not for Sharon White, who grabbed him and told him to cool off and come back the following week, Valentine isn’t sure what he would have done once he walked out the door.

He was a quick study, however, and soon became an employee, working with clients.

“In Alvin you have this mix that I really love,” Medina says. “He’s a tough guy, as you can clearly see. But he can get across to people.”

Friedman and Valentine’s relationship was contentious at first. Valentine bristled at what he saw as Friedman’s dismissive manner.

“Adam doesn’t realize it but Adam can come across as condescending,” Medina says. “He puts this facial expression on like he’s saying, ‘How can you not know that?’ I should know. He does it to me. It was definitely rubbing Alvin the wrong way.”

Valentine had spent nearly a decade in prison, where respect was the common currency. Now his supervisor was not paying it.

“Imagine Alvin comes here from prison, where he called the shots, and now he’s looking at this guy Adam telling him what to do in, let’s face it, a really annoying way,” Medina says.

Valentine confronted Medina about it.

“He came to me one day and he was angry,” Medina says. “He told me he didn’t think he could take it anymore. He said Adam was a sucker and all this. I told him to be patient. Friedman is a good guy.”

Valentine remembers his frustrations. “I went in there and was like, ‘Who is this white dude?’” he says.

Although friction defined most of their relationship, Medina says they developed an unusually strong bond.

“They are both committed to the work,” he says. “They just do it in their own ways. Something that each of them respect is their intelligence.”

* * *

See You Monday

Round one begins with a false start: Valentine hits Friedman before the bell goes off.

“When he first hit me before the bell I thought, ‘O.K., I can take a shot,’” Friedman recalls. Both fighters return to their corners.

After landing a blow and getting a taste of action, Valentine is impatient. He is restless in his corner and eager to get into it. As the bell rings, he freezes for an instant in a boxing pose then lurches into the ring.

Friedman shows no hesitation. He doesn’t wait for Valentine to come to him. He takes long, crane-like strides toward Valentine. Friedman throws the first punch, a left jab that glances off of Valentine’s guard. But Valentine, a southpaw, lands the first blow, two right jabs in quick succession that catch Friedman on the chin. Friedman regains his balance and the two exchange a series of punches, each feeling the other out. They circle each other in the center of the ring, neither man backing down.

Valentine gets in a punch during his bout with Friedman.

Then Valentine sets Friedman up with a combination. He absorbs a left jab from Friedman and responds with a right jab, then a body blow. When Friedman lowers his guard for an instant to protect his ribs, Valentine takes advantage and lands a devastating left overhand. It lands with a popping sound and jars Friedman’s head. Valentine tries to follow it with a roundhouse right to knock him out, but Friedman backs away from the blow and it narrowly misses.

That flurry of action leads to a cautious ending to the first round as they throw some exploratory jabs, and then size each other up. The bell sounds and the fighters return to their corner. Friedman talks strategy with his corner man, who squirts some water from a Poland Spring sport bottle into his mouth.

Friedman remembers thinking, “Wow, thirty seconds is a long time in the ring.”

Round two opens with a blur of activity, both men throwing a riot of punches. Friedman throws a left that Valentine needs to step back from to avoid. Valentine responds with a wild right that Friedman dodges. But Valentine composes himself and sets Friedman up for another savage combination. He stuns Friedman with a left to his chest, then follows up with a right to the face that brings the lanky fighter to his knees, his head bowed as if in supplication.

The referee, an employee of the gym, sporting jeans, a white t-shirt and a gold necklace dangling from his neck, rushes over. Friedman pops up quickly, but the ref examines him closely before letting him get back to the match. He asks Friedman a series of questions to make sure he is O.K. to continue. Friedman looks woozy, but he is ready to go. He nods his head vigorously. The ref lifts his guard and tests whether Friedman can hold his fists up on his own. He can, and the fight continues.

They meet again, exchanging some punches, but most of them are deflected. Friedman seems to find his legs and holds his own until the end of the round.

Rounds one and two were unanimous for Valentine, but in the third and final round Friedman fights to a draw, giving as good as he gets, landing a few shots, and taking some solid blows from Valentine without breaking stride or faltering. Throughout the last round Friedman seems to savor each moment, not wasting time dancing. He is active, taking healthy swings. He advances on Valentine, keeping up the pressure.

“Alvin said there were a few things he tried in that round and that I foiled him,” Friedman says later.

The bell rings and an exhausted Friedman struggles to raise his arms in triumph. The two fighters hug briefly in the ring after the fight. There is an atmosphere of camaraderie in both Friedman and Valentine’s corners. The fight meant different things to each boxer.

A video of the fight between Adam Friedman and Alvin Valentine, directed by Vin DeCrescenzo and produced by Adam Friedman.

Valentine was the unanimous victor, at least to the handful of pugilists who took a break from their workout to watch the odd match, but Friedman acquitted himself respectfully. He was palpably relieved when he scooted under the ropes and took in what he had just accomplished.

Friedman dedicated the fight to his two sons and looked forward to the day when they could watch a tape of it and understand why he did it.

Valentine used it to measure his stamina. At the time he had aspirations of boxing regularly again and wanted to get into shape to go the distance for a twelve-round fight.

“I’m glad there was a knock-down,” a jubilant Friedman said, loping around the ring, his hair matted with sweat. “I’m glad. I feel like I got hit. And I got up!”

Valentine shook his hand and shouted in support: “You got up, man!”

Valentine had considered Friedman a friend before they fought. But now he had a newfound respect for his co-worker.

“I am very proud of Adam,” he said. “I think he did an extraordinary job. Tremendous.”

“He was in rare form today,” he added with a broad smile.

Alvin Valentine congratulates Adam Friedman after the fight.

Friedman and Valentine shook hands and then hugged. As they gathered their belongings and prepared to go their separate ways the two men said their goodbyes.

“I’ll see you Monday,” Friedman said.

“See you Monday,” Valentine confirmed.

They had work to do.

* * *

The Aftermath

The fight became a thing of lightweight legend around Exodus. Friedman earned the respect of his colleagues for daring to step into the ring with Valentine. Medina took him aside and told him, “That took guts.” Valentine would show the footage of the fight to his friends, who chastised Friedman for not attacking when Valentine stepped back and dropped his guard to showboat.

Friedman’s own father could not bear to watch the tape of the fight. He didn’t want to see his son get hit. (Though that didn’t stop him from encouraging his son to “knock him out!” the morning of the fight.)

The fight with Valentine did not have a sudden, transformative effect on Friedman. But a little while after the fight, Friedman was at work late one night doing an assessment of data on Exodus clients, tracking the number of people who were meeting with the job development counselor. He noticed that forty percent of the clients were not going to their meetings, which, for a newly released inmate, is unacceptable. An essential part of integrating back into society is getting a job. Everyone wants an inmate to have a job—the parole officer, the reentry counselors, and the inmate himself.

Alvin Valentine gives a lecture at Exodus Transitional Community for the new clients, who come every Monday morning.

While many former inmates who might be tough when faced with physical confrontation, they are daunted by the prospect of sitting down for a job interview. The clients would fumble for excuses to avoid meeting with the counselor. Friedman was troubled by the discovery. And that's when he had a revelation.

“It’s not that they were lazy,” he says. “It was that they were scared.”

At Exodus, Valentine always led the first meeting with new clients, telling them his life story, using his experience to earn their trust and encourage them to avail themselves of the programs at their disposal. After Valentine gave his presentation, it was Friedman’s turn. He headed up a workshop on the nuts and bolts of what the program had to offer.

The next Monday, before he launched into his spiel, he played the tape of the fight.

“If I can get in a ring with Alvin,” he told them after it was over, “then you can go out on a job interview.”

The following week the head of job development sent out an email to the staff. It informed them that for the first time, not one client missed their appointment for the week.

* * *

Going After the Big Dog

About a year after the fight, Medina and Friedman parted ways. They had different ideas about what direction to take the organization, and clashed on a number of occasions over the program's details. Friedman thought it best to look for a new job, so he left.

When the phone rang at 5:55 a.m. on a weekday about five months ago, Friedman jolted awake in a panic. His first thought was: Who died?

He answered the phone. It was former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, who had served as an advisor to Exodus when Friedman worked there. McGreevey asked him if he would like to work for Jersey City, helping formerly incarcerated people make a go of it. Steven Fulop, the mayor, had appointed McGreevey, famous as America’s first self-described “Gay American” governor, to a position as executive director of the Jersey City Employment and Training Program. McGreevey wanted Friedman to join his team as deputy director.

In the wake of the public disintegration of his political and private life after getting caught up in a gay sex scandal with a staffer in 2004, McGreevey has dedicated himself to reforming juvenile and criminal justice, helping people, young and old, to avoid getting caught in the prison pipeline. He worked closely with Integrity House, an organization that helps women prisoners and victims of domestic violence in a number of ways, from job training to providing substance abuse programs.

Now, back in the public sector in Jersey City, McGreevey is behind an initiative to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline for at-risk youth. The program brings together the city Board of Education with the building trade unions, providing high school juniors with union mentors.

From his small office in a bleak grey building in the Journal Square neighborhood of Jersey City, Friedman paused as he reflected on how the fight affected him. He leaned back in his squeaking office chair and stared at the drop ceiling. He said he has become not a better father, but a more confident one.

“I wanted to show my kids that you can get in a ring with Alvin,” he said. “If my dad had stepped into the ring with Alvin maybe I would've grown up differently. I didn't want to raise them to be cowards like I was. Getting into the ring with Alvin showed that I could go after the Big Dog.”

* * *

“Sometimes I Wished I Caught a Bullet in the Stomach Rather Than Do This Time”

Steven Llanos calls Friedman and Valentine "the odd couple” with a resonant laugh that speaks to the absurdity of the pairing. Despite their differences, Llanos credits both men, in their own idiosyncratic ways, for saving his life.

Llanos, thirty-five, was in the life as far back as he could remember, selling selling crack at nine years old. Whenever he got in trouble, his mother, a drug addict, would always be there to bail him out because she knew she would be able to get drugs from her son as compensation.

Llanos was on his way to scoring crack to get back in the drug-dealing game when a wrong turn in East Harlem landed him in front of the white church that housed Exodus. A group of men were outside on a smoke break when he overheard them talking about prison. Llanos had recently been released after finishing a bid for drug dealing. A member of the group invited him up for some lunch and a coffee. It was Valentine.

“Alvin invited me upstairs, he invited me to his workshops, he gave me lunch and coffee, something to drink,” Llanos says. “I never left after that.”

He stayed on—first as a client, then as a counselor, then moved up to project manager. Valentine’s example gave him the confidence to keep his head down and throw himself into the work. Llanos and Valentine had similar backgrounds as children who grew up in a world of violence and crime. He eventually looked up to Friedman as a father figure, a source of inspiration as he negotiated the pitfalls of fatherhood.

“My dad was pretty much not in my life,” Llanos said. “Adam was like the father I always wished I had growing up. When I saw Adam and the way he was coaching Little League, and being present in his kids’ lives, watching him be the father he was made me become the father that I am.”

But that was not always the case. Llanos says that initially he was weary of Friedman.

“It was that old prison mentality,” he says.

As a child and teen, Llanos only saw white people as members of a system that ground him, and people like him, down. When his friends got beaten by the cops, he says, the officers were always white. When he got placed in foster care, the people who wrenched him from his family, they were white. When he was in prison, it was always a white corrections officer who was meting out discipline.

“I don’t know what they call it, transference and stuff like that,” he says. “But it started to change when I saw that tape. That’s when I started to trust Adam. It brought humor. He was funny; he was goofy.”

Two years ago, Llanos relocated his wife, whom he met through a prison pen-pals program, and his eight children to suburban Atlanta. He went to school to become a welder and now runs a crew as a foreman. He does not think he would have made it if he hadn't met Friedman and Valentine, and says he intends to go back to helping former prisoners make that transition to mainstream society.

Llanos had a refrain he would repeat to both the clients and his coworkers at Exodus: “We are the population we serve.”

The phrase flashed in his mind’s eye when he heard that Valentine had been shot in the summer of 2010.

Before he left Exodus, Friedman said Valentine started becoming “feral.” Friedman said it was hard to put his finger on it, but that he became withdrawn and started acting “gangstery.”

So when word reached him that Valentine had returned to the life he had sworn to leave behind, it was devastating news, but it didn’t come as a complete surprise.

It didn’t come as a surprise to Llanos either.

“I just think Alvin lost track,” he says. “He forgot where he had come from, what he had left behind. And you should forget that life. But there’s a catch-22 at the same time. That life we lived—it’s the nature of the 'hood. He forgot the pain and got caught up again.”

Llanos says that the longer a former prisoner is free, the easier it is for him to take that freedom for granted.

“You forget about the four o’clock count, the guys you left behind in prison. When you forget that, then you’re in trouble.”

Llanos was relieved to hear that Valentine survived. And he was not surprised that he turned his life around once again in the wake of the shooting.

“Unfortunately he went through that pain, but it got him back on track,” Llanos says. “Sometimes I wished I caught a bullet in the stomach rather than do this time. Sometimes. You need that pain to get back on track.”

According to his old friends, Valentine is working as a doorman and building manager in Long Island City, a gentrified waterfront neighborhood in Queens. It’s a job that McGreevey helped him get once he heard his former colleague had lapsed.

* * *

“People From the Hood, We Don’t Do Yoga”

In prison, Llanos says, you develop a sixth sense. When something is about to go down in the yard or the mess hall, that sixth sense starts humming. One afternoon at a workshop he was leading at Exodus, Llanos said his sixth sense was in overdrive. Two clients in the room had a turbulent history in prison. One of the men had ordered the stabbing of the other client’s friend. The old score was about to be settled in the church basement.

“It was really getting to the point where, if we were in prison, it would’ve been on,” he says, recalling the incident. “They made eye contact and you could feel it going through you. Something was brewing. It was about to happen.”

Llanos interrupted his workshop and asked if there was a problem. One man responded: “Yeah—him.”

The other man stood, ready to fight. Llanos pleaded with them to give him a minute, one minute.

“I grabbed the tape and threw it in there,” Llanos said.

The two rivals watched the tape of the fight, saw Friedman’s and Valentine’s preparation, and saw their camaraderie after it was over.

“People from the hood, we don’t do yoga,” Llanos says, referring to a portion of the video where Friedman is folded into a ball. “When they saw Adam doing yoga, they were on the floor cracking up.”

Llanos says watching the fight lifted the tension in the room. A week later when the two men met for staff lunch and held a service, they were side-by-side, part of a circle holding hands.

“That tape, that fight,” he said. “It was like magic.”

* * *

Daryl Khan is the New York bureau chief for the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, a national news site that covers young people and the system, where he assigns stories and writes long-form and investigative pieces. He runs the bureau from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where he also teaches.

Robert Stolarik has been a regular contributor to the New York Times since 2000 and has worked on assignments covering the Kosovo Conflict, Civil War in Colombia, coup d'etat in Venezuela, Hurricane Katrina, Haitian earthquake, and Hurricane Sandy for Time Magazine, Le Monde 2, Stern, Newsweek , The National, and JJIE.